Tips Tuesday — Creative Outlets

Flam­ing Hot’s Tues­day Tip is to have more than one cre­ative out­let, so that when your cre­ativ­ity goes south in one area, you have some­thing else to work on.? This shift­ing gears lets other parts of your cre­ative ener­gies get exer­cised while the exhausted area rests, and is sup­posed to get you back on track more quickly.

I’ve actu­ally been doing this for a long time.? Back when I was a weaver, I almost always had two dif­fer­ent projects going on two dif­fer­ent looms.? Often I’d be design­ing and warp­ing up one project while I was weav­ing off the other, which worked because those are actu­ally two very dif­fer­ent processes.? Or, if I only had one weav­ing project going and it just wasn’t work­ing at the moment, I could turn to my spin­ning wheel and just Zen out with some fiber.? Before that, I’d have two needle­work projects, or a needle­work project and some­thing else, going so that I could switch back and forth.

With lam­p­work it’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent, though.? If the boro isn’t work­ing today, I can drop the kiln tem­per­a­ture and switch over to soft glass.? If beads are act­ing poopy, I can play with off-​mandrel work and make pen­dants or mar­bles.? Still, there are days when the glass just isn’t work­ing. Then I turn off the torch and pull out the cro­chet, or the spin­ning wheel, or put together a book, or even work on my web site.? Or, for that mat­ter, I can go read, or veg­e­tate, or sleep!

Even at work I tend to do this!? I can only work so long on one thing there before I have to switch gears and do some­thing else.? I some­times won­der how I man­aged to teach class for four and a half hours straight with­out going nuts — that’s a long time to be doing ANYTHING with­out a change of pace.